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Everything Starts with Reliability

Oct 22, 2025

TVA and BTES Collaborate to Meet Load Growth

In planning for the future, Bristol Tennessee Essential Services (BTES) faced a trifecta of sorts: the potential for significant industrial growth in its service territory, limited system capacity to meet that growth, and delivery points not close enough to the possible areas of growth.

Through careful coordination and planning, BTES and the Tennessee Valley Authority developed a solution.

In September 2025, after a couple years of work to bring the solution to life, a new substation in South Bristol came online – and it will help meet the local power company’s needs for years to come.

“Everything starts with reliability,” Clayton Dowell, BTES Chief Executive Officer, said. “We need to serve existing customers in the best ways possible and maintain that reliability and resilience as we grow with new load. The design is so helpful, because it gives us a lot of flexibility in how we route power through the substation.”

“We anticipate it being a pivotal part of our system indefinitely,” he added. “I appreciate the process with TVA, because together we looked at what was in the best interest of the end-users – our customers.”

Getting the South Bristol substation up and running entailed far more than just the work in that location.

TVA worked with BTES, with public input, to establish a preferred transmission route before clearing the right of way, then TVA built a new 161-kilovolt substation and two transmission lines to serve the new delivery point.

A roughly 3-mile transmission line was built from the Bluff City substation to South Bristol, and a roughly 10-mile transmission line was built from the Sullivan substation to South Bristol.

One of the unique features of the project is that the two new lines provide physical diversity and redundancy, because they provide two distinct routes into the substation. In addition, several existing BTES 69-kilovolt lines already converge there.

“We instantly have six directions out from a 69-kilovolt sub transmission perspective,” Dowell said.

The transmission line construction teams, which included TVA and contractor teams, faced numerous challenges – from working in tremendous heat to having to build in heavily mountainous and rocky areas. TVA helicopter crews assisted by flying in the ropes for pulling in the new conductor and clipping in overhead ground wire on some of the line sections.

As always, TVA worked closely with landowners in areas that needed to be cleared.

“In any project, we work to reassure the community and end customers that TVA is here for them,” Denny Brown, TVA project manager, said. “TVA is built by the people, for the people, and we live by that. Our employees live in the Tennessee Valley, too, and we treat everyone as neighbors. That is what they deserve.”

The transmission line teams were equally conscientious about the environment – from pulling line over the environmentally diverse South Holston River to ensuring they worked around cave systems and bat habitat.

“There are nationally recognized caves in the area, and TVA is committed to being a good steward,” Brown said. “We stayed engaged with TVA’s in-house zoologist, Jesse Troxler, who helped us avoid impacts to federally endangered species and provided critical coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Our right-of-way crews started tree clearing several months ahead of schedule to avoid bat breeding and pup season during the summer months.”

BTES currently serves more than 34,000 customers, with an all-time winter peak of 300 megawatts. (For reference, 1 megawatt supplies roughly enough energy to power more than 585 average homes.)

BTES’s studies on future growth in its service area show that demand could see significant increases by the end of the decade, Dowell said.

“This project is in this location and is this large because of the potential for increased industrial growth in this area,” Dowell said. “While the substation was under construction, we got inquiries from companies looking to expand. We anticipate a real need in the future.”